A Pigeon and a Boy (45 page)

Just as I thought: a
MESHULAM FRIED AND DAUGHTER, INC.
vehicle was parked outside. I set up my chair in the garden, under the fig tree that had been transplanted there by Meshulam years earlier and that was now a large tree, and I sat in the darkness. From there, no one could see me, whereas I had a clear view of Yordad’s front door. Shortly after eleven o’clock the door opened, Meshulam called out, “Good night,” locked the door from outside, exited the stairwell, and looked
around. What would I say if he spotted me? I would tell him the truth. Meshulam would listen, remove his handkerchief from his pocket, and say, “And who will watch over me since Gershon?” and he would offer to take over for me or keep me company

But Meshulam did not notice me. He got into his car and drove off The light was on in Yordad’s bathroom. I could hear him coughing and spitting. When people were visiting him he did not cough like that and most certainly did not spit. After that, the light in his bedroom went out and only a small lamp in the kitchen remained lit.

I was sitting like that, bored and weary when suddenly the light in the stairwell went on. I came to attention, but for naught: it was only Yordad’s tenant coming down from the second floor. He removed something from his car, held a brief conversation on his mobile phone replete with stifled giggles, then disappeared back into the stairwell. Twice, people arrived and went up to the top floor. Then all at once I grew tense, because Benjamin had shown up and was standing at the door. He listened, but he did not touch the door handle or ring the buzzer or open the door. I did not move from my hiding place, and my brother departed.

Slowly, the air chilled and grew humid. The passersby diminished and ceased altogether. An after-midnight wind kicked up suddenly resounding lightly in the small trees and loudly in the large one. From far away came the short and terrible scream of a woman, followed by silence and then barking. Bats circled in the lamplight, catching insects attracted to its glow

At three in the morning I left. There was light at Glick’s kiosk; Mr. Glick was already at work in the kitchen. “If you can hang on five minutes I’ll have a samwich ready for you,” he called out to me from the window “Meantime, here’s a coffee for you.”

I drank it down. Mr. Glick asked, “Make one for Fried’s daughter, too?”

I blushed. “I won’t be seeing her today,” I said.

“That’s no good,” Mr. Glick said. “A woman like that, every day without her is a waste.”

“You’re right, Mr. Glick,” I said. “All the days without her have been a waste. It was a mistake.”

He gave me the samwich. “Don’t eat it right away Give it a few minutes so the tastes inside can mix up together. Since she’s a little girl I been telling her that. Tirzah Fried, she’s something special. She’s not
like the others.
Nu,
if you get a move on it before I finally kick the bucket, God willing, then I’ll make the food for your wedding.”

All the way down from Jerusalem toward Jericho I thought about Yordad, whether or not to tell him about this evening spent in the garden of his building. And then northward bound, in the Jordan Rift Valley, I thought mostly about myself, and my story, and the need for a story in general, and what a man whose story reached its climax before he was even born is supposed to do with himself. Then farther on, near the kibbutz where the Baby grew up, I drove off onto the dirt road on which he had ridden his bicycle with Miriam. I stopped by the abandoned building that had once been a pump house, and my thoughts—in spite of the independence we like to invest them with—moved logically sanely, from the first dispatch to the last. Only a few pigeon handlers were in attendance at the Baby’s funeral. The war had not yet ended, there was still so much work to do, and the roads were dangerous. The father came from Jerusalem. The aunt, the uncle, and Miriam came from the kibbutz. Premature gray was strewn through Miriam’s hair. The uncle and the father stood far apart from one another, each one crying in his own fashion, and they did not exchange a single word.

Dr. Laufer and the Girl were there, too. The Girl had difficulty moving and breathing. Every few seconds her mouth gaped and she gulped air in spasms. But the two cells in her womb had already divided and become four, and the four were soon to divide again, later that day, to become eight, then sixteen, then thirty-two, then me, today Dr. Laufer, the only person apart from her to know, delivered a eulogy and his feminine
pluralis majestatis,
which never failed to amuse his listeners, this time brought about feelings of horror, because it sounded like the eulogy of a thousand mothers and daughters and sisters and lovers.

One must take advantage of every trip for dispatching pigeons, and each of the pigeon handlers who attended carried a woven wicker pigeon basket with a handle and a lid. At the end of the funeral the pigeons were dispatched, and they soared above the tears and the mourning and the fresh grave. Dr. Laufer said, “This is both a training exercise and a beautiful sight. Perhaps we will make this a tradition at memorial services.”

Chapter Twenty-Three

T
OO BAD
you were not here today to watch Tirzah’s all-star plastering team work on the house you bought for me: a band of Druze men from a single family in Ussefiye, all with broad mustaches and colorful skullcaps. First they built scaffolding on the outer wall of the house; then they climbed up and stood on it, two on the top level and two on the lower level. They rubbed their hands with olive oil to protect their skin, and then they plastered as one and smoothed as one, using exactly the same movements.

“Why four men on one wall?” I asked. “Why doesn’t each man take a wall and work on it?”

Tirzah explained that the whole wall needed to dry simultaneously and in the same sun so there would be no differences in the texture or the hue.

They began by throwing plaster at the wall and smoothing it down, this layer intended to seal the cement. On top of that they added a second layer, which they smoothed and evened out by scraping it in circular motions with round handsaws, and then they topped it off with a third layer spread with long, fast rollers. Inside the house they would do the same with a yellowish wash, not white—Tirzah and I do not like white—and the outside plaster was to be covered with a pigmented stucco, the color of which—so Tirzah tells me—is “peach.”

A fifth man plastered inside the house. He climbed up and worked from a low and heavy ladder, examining the metal mesh of the ceiling the way you check the strings of a harp, with pinches and tugs. The mesh hummed for him to fill in its empty eyes, and he tossed plaster at
it, tossed and smoothed, and when he finished Tirzah said, That’s it, that is our ceiling, not the ceiling of someone who lived here previously, and soon the workers will depart and I am pleased to see that you have strength and desire, Iraleh, because we have a double inauguration to do: the ceiling and the stucco.

T
HE
C
HINESE WORKERS
spread a layer of sealant on the foundation beneath what was to become the bathroom floor. They laid long plastic tubing in green and black, which they fastened to the floor with hand-fuls of cement. A plumber and an electrician arrived on the scene to thread pipes and cables through the tubing. And when everything was dry and attached and smoothed and rounded and sealed and fastened and examined, Meshulam turned up with Steinfeld the tiler.

“Hello, Steinfeld,” Tirzah called out. “And hello, Meshulam. The weather stripping looks very nice.”

Steinfeld was carrying the same old schoolbag on his back, the same bucket in his hand. This time it held a hammer, a spirit level, a putty knife, and a pillow His mouth continued to spout complaints as though only just then had he finished the
stichmuss
work he had begun several weeks earlier: “You see? This is the tiler’s hammer I was talking about; you’ll only see it on real craftsmen. No plastic or rubber, like today The head alone is three pounds of iron for chiseling bumps and angles, and the handle is made of poplar wood for pounding and straightening. The handle’s seven inches long, exactly like my
shmekele,
but thicker and softer.”

“What are all these tall tales you’re telling?” Meshulam said. “They still use your tiler’s hammer for the old floor tiles—it’s the ceramic tiles they use the rubber hammer for.”

“The old floor tiles are prettier,” Steinfeld grumbled, “and the measurements of the ceramic tiles are less accurate.” He expounded against marble flooring, too, which “makes the new houses look like the bathroom of Rothschild’s maid.”

“You’re the home owner, not them!” he said, turning to me. This pleased Tirzah and Meshulam to no end. “Let the Frieds put whatever they want in their house. For your house, I’m going to bring you the good old-fashioned floor tiles, eight by eight inches.”

Tirzah protested. “That makes more tiles, more work, more grouting for the eye to see, and the ceramics machine can’t cut them for the wedges at the end.”

“Tiraleh, you forget that it’s Steinfeld the tiler who’s doing the work. There aren’t going to be many wedges, and the few there are we’ll cut with a disc.”

“He doesn’t even use a vise when he cuts,” Meshulam whispered to me, full of admiration. “The guy’s eighty, he holds the tile in one hand and cuts with the other. You’ll see it and you won’t believe it. When he uses the disc it’s like cutting butter with a butcher’s wife.”

An hour later a truck pulled up and unloaded the tiles. In the meantime, however, a new argument had broken out: Steinfeld insisted on using sand beneath the tiles, while Tirzah preferred fine gravel. She even shared her
FOR
and
AGAINST
with me: with sand you could mix in a little mortar powder, which would cause it to stick to the loam better, but its tiny grains transfer moisture from place to place, “and then you have to pull up half the house to figure out where it’s coming from.”

“I don’t like gravel under tiles,” Steinfeld complained. “Sand sits quiet. Gravel I can hear like this: kkkhhhh … kkkhhh … kkkhhh …”

Tirzah laughed, but this time she did not give in. “First of all, you won’t be living in this house. And second of all,” she said, pointing to me, “he won’t hear the kkkhhh … kkkhhh … You are the only person in the world who can hear it.”

Steinfeld muttered something, then acquiesced, and Tirzah said, “Never mind. You got your way about the tiles and I got mine about what goes underneath. Your victory can be seen, but mine can’t.”

Meshulam filled with pride. “You see that? You see how she’s fighting for you? By the teeth of her skin! By the skin of her nails!”

“That’s what makes you happy?” Tirzah asked her father later. “That your daughter, who has built hotels and hospitals and industrial centers and shopping malls and highway interchanges, and who wins battles against all the bureaucrats in the Defense Ministry and the Housing Ministry and the Transportation Ministry hands down, managed to bend Steinfeld the tiler to her will?”

“Don’t move!” Meshulam said. “You know you got two gray hairs over your forehead?”

“What’s going to be with you, Father? What kind of nonsense have you got running through your head?”

“Oh, that’s beautiful. Now I can finally rest in peace.”

“It’s bad enough that I cry over those gray hairs,” Tirzah said. “But you? Put that handkerchief back in your pocket right away!”

“It’s not because of the gray hairs. It’s because you finally called me ‘Father.’”

“Oh, stop talking rubbish. Go on, say it: ‘If my Gershon were alive, he would have gray hairs on his head.’”

Steinfeld got angry “Enough! You’re making it impossible to work around here.”

He drew a string the length of the room to indicate where the first row should be placed, and the younger of the Chinese workers flattened out the gravel on the exposed concrete. Steinfeld instructed him to pour into the mixing pan the white and the regular sand, the whitewash and the mortar, while he himself added the water.

The Chinese laborer ran the hoe through the mixing pan, chuckling to himself under a barrage of angry shouts issued by Steinfeld. “You see? That’s exactly why I didn’t want it! There are lumps! Try explaining to the
Khinezer
that the loam has to be as smooth and delicious as chopped liver.”

He placed the embroidered pillow he had brought with him on the floor and knelt on it with a groan. The worker brought him a bucket filled with loam. Steinfeld plunged his putty knife into it and tipped a fair amount onto the gravel, smoothing it, then adding a bit more and smoothing it, again. His movements were quick and thrifty, altogether different from his speech and gait. With the end of his putty knife he drew two little lightning bolts, two little
z
’s, in the loam. “That way it won’t all spill out the sides. From the pressure it’ll fill up the inside and reach everywhere.”

After that he placed the first tile, tapped it gently with the wooden handle of the hammer, and with the edge of the putty knife he gathered the leftover loam that had squeezed out from underneath. He set down the spirit level from north to south and from east to west and said, “You see how straight it is? Even if you put a ball bearing on it, it wouldn’t budge. Even the pool table of the president of the United States of America isn’t as level as the floor I’m building you here.”